The Journal of William Morris Studies

The Journal of William Morris Studies volume xx, number 4, summer 2014 Editorial – Pearls for the ancestors Patrick O’Sullivan 3 William Morris’s unpublished Arthurian translations, Roger Simpson 7 William Morris’s paternal ancestry Dorothy Coles†, revised Barbara Lawrence 19 The ancestry of William Morris: the Worcester connection David Everett 34 Jane Morris and her male correspondents Peter Faulkner 60 ‘A clear Xame-like spirit’: Georgiana Burne-Jones and Rottingdean, 1904-1920 Stephen Williams 79 Reviews. Edited by Peter Faulkner Linda Parry, William Morris Textiles (Lynn Hulse) 91 Mike and Kate Lea, eds, W.G Collingwood’s Letters from Iceland: Travels in Iceland 1897 (John Purkis) 95 Gary Sargeant, Friends and InXuences: The Memoirs of an Artist (John Purkis) 98 the journal of william morris studies . summer 2014 Barrie and Wendy Armstrong, The Arts and Crafts Movement in the North East of England (Martin Haggerty) 100 Barrie and Wendy Armstrong, The Arts and Crafts Movement in Yorkshire (Ian Jones) 103 Annette Carruthers, The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland. A History (Peter Faulkner) 106 Laura Euler, Arts and Crafts Embroidery (Linda Parry) 110 Clive Bloom, Victoria’s Madmen. Revolution and Alienation (Peter Faulkner) 111 Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life (Christine Poulsom) 114 Carl Levy, ed, Colin Ward. Life,Times and Thought (Peter Faulkner) 117 Rosalind Williams, The Triumph of the Human Empire. Verne, Morris and Stevenson at the end of the world (Patrick O’Sullivan) 120 Guidelines for Contributors 124 Notes on Contributors 126 ISSN: 1756-1353 Editor: Patrick O’Sullivan ([email protected]) Reviews Editor: Peter Faulkner ([email protected]) Designed by David Gorman ([email protected]) Printed by the Short Run Press, Exeter, UK (http://www.shortrunpress.co.uk/) All material printed (except where otherwise stated) copyright the William Mor- ris Society. 2 Editorial – Pearls for the ancestors Patrick O’Sullivan … one of the things … I learned from both my mother and my dad … is that … wanting to make the world a better place is (part of) … a tradition that’s probably been going on for as long as people have been around. And that is a wonderful thing for a young person to discover … that he or she is not the beginning of a thing but somewhere in the middle of a long line of people ... It gives you the ability ... to ... that you don’t have to Wnish a job within the space of a lifetime. It takes a lot of pressure oV if you know that all you have to do is to link up to the future. That’s the job of being a human … to make the connection to the future and hold on to the connection to the past. (Arlo Guthrie, US National Public Radio, 20 April 1985) What is the reason for the current truly enormous interest in tracing one’s own and other people’s ancestry? In this issue we print articles both about Morris’s mother’s lineage, and that of his father, about which, for the moment at least, rather less is known. Of course, genealogy is also a professional discipline, requir- ing considerable knowledge and skill, but visit any UK County Record OYce on any day, and you will probably meet at least one person intent on tracing their ancestry: many of these oYces have long geared themselves up for this enthu- siasm. I must declare that some years ago, I too became interested in this very subject – there are, apparently, some thirty million people on this planet who can claim Irish ancestry – and although I am afraid I have left the overwhelming bulk of the work to my cousin, I continue to be fascinated by her Wndings. One key factor is, of course, the Internet, which means that much of this kind of activity can now be conducted from home, and, in theory anyway, at a faster rate, although that may also be a myth. And then there are numerous courses in tracing ones ancestors – some of them run or advertised by the same Record OYces – and television programmes on the same subject, although, of course 3 the journal of william morris studies . summer 2014 these have soon become preoccupied with ‘celebrity’. Beyond this, I believe that there may be in many of us (but not, I am assured by a colleague, all of us) some basic need to Wnd out not just who we are, and where we are from – although modern preoccupation with the self may be important here – but also the sequence of historical events leading to where we are, and who we are, today – hence my reference above to Arlo Guthrie. Many of us Wnd that the answers to such questions often involve our ancestors’ lives being touched by great events – Enclosure, the Highland Clearances. For example, our grandfather, a British soldier threatened in 1917 with assassination by Irish Republicans, decided to ‘hide out’ in Wiltshire, the home of his then regiment. Without that death threat, none of my immediate family would be who and where they are today. But it was not until I saw The Plough and the Stars, and realised that the same regiment (but not his battalion) was responsible for ‘mopping up’ in Dublin after the 1916 Easter Rising, that I realised just how dangerous our grandfather’s life must have been at that particular time. Further beyond, I believe that interest in one’s origins – in some of us anyway – is an expression of unease at the rootless life which modernity has imposed upon us. A second important factor – it is mostly more mature people who are interested in such matters – may, in the UK, be the 1944 Education Act, which widened access, albeit selective, to secondary education, followed by the Robbins Report on Higher Education (1963) which did much the same for universities. Both of these major educational changes created a generation uprooted from their homes and sent to study, and then to work, in places they had not grown up in. While at Wrst they also produced new kinds of Wlms, and a new literature, both depicting aspects of life in Britain previously ignored by elite media (for example, ‘kitchen sink’ television plays), those of us who are not Wlm directors, novelists or playwrights need some other means of expression. Hence the interest, I think, in tracing one’s ancestry. And rootlessness is indeed both a modern phenomenon, and a phenomenon of modernity. For example, in his study of the Parliamentary Enclosures, Mark Overton (The Agricultural Revolution in England. The transformation of the agrar- ian economy,1500-1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 257 pp.), points out that in 1500, most people in England made their living by farming of some kind, and that most farmers assumed that their children and their grand- children would continue to do so, in much the same way, and in the same place. By 1800 this was no longer the case. And in his wonderful study of the !Kung San of the Kalahari (The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, 526 pp.), Richard Lee explained how the practise of ‘bride service’ (also found among ‘Wrst nation’ Australians) meant that each member of the band was conceived on one location (the ‘little N!ore’), but raised in another (the ‘big N!ore’), a practice which served to spread 4 editorial the impact of the population across the landscape during times of dearth. But what it also meant was that the !Kung San, like many forager people, felt themselves and their ancestors to be intimately connected to the land of both N!ores – hence their usual enormous reservations about being forced to die away from what was both Wguratively, and for them literally, their ancestral home. Neolithic peoples also possess cosmologies which express intimate links between living and dead, time and place. For example, in Pigs for the Ancestors. Ritual in the ecology of a New Guinea people (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968, 502 pp.) Roy Rappaport explains how the Tsembaga Maring of modern Papua New Guinea conceive the entire valley in which they live to consist of a ‘cool, damp’ lower zone possessed by the ‘wet spirits’ (or the ‘spirits of rot’; those who govern the lower body, and diseases of the gut) to which wastes can (and should) be conveyed, a middle zone inhabited by the living devoted to horticul- ture, and a hot, dry upper region which is the home of the ‘Red Spirits’ (those who control the upper body and respiratory disease; the ancestors) from where nothing can be taken without their express permission. Similar cosmologies expressing the essential role of water in connecting people, food production and pollution also exist on Bali. And it is also said that on Morris’s beloved Iceland, many people can recite their ancestry back to initial Norse arrival in 874 CE. Morris’s concept of history is, of course, explained in A Dream of John Ball: ... I pondered all these things, and how men Wght and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to Wght for what they meant under another name ... but his vision was not a ‘progressive’ one, and he did not subscribe to what he termed the ‘Whig’ version of history. Instead what Morris saw in history was a continual struggle on the part of ordinary people to protect their livelihood, and the land which supported them, especially from the landlord.

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